– The emails you send may be classified as spam by your recipients which will cause further delivery issues.

– Violating anti-spam laws and could get sued for doing so.

– Generating complaints, resulting in IPs getting blocked at major ISPs all over the world.

– Getting blacklisted for sending spam, which could filter down to your own domain and/or your hosting provider. If this happens, your hosting provider could terminate your account and you could lose your website, email and hosting service.

How do I build the right list?

The right list has to follow specific rules:

It must have appropriate consent. This is the Golden Rule! Recipients must have agreed to receive your message, either because they opted in to a mailing list, signed up for a newsletter, or agreed to get content from you.

It must be up to date. People’s email addresses can change, and you need to send to their current address. If an email bounces because the address is no longer valid, it must be removed from your list.

It must respect a recipients right to change their mind. If someone has opted out of a mailing list, they must be removed and not receive another message.

Ideally, you should be whitelisted by recipients. This means that the recipients email server and mail client should know that emails from you are legitimate no matter what content you are sending them. You should encourage recipients to add you to their contact list, address book, or to their approved sender list to alleviate content filters issues and help establish you as a “trusted” sender.

Most ISPs provide their users with several ways of doing this. For example, if the user clicks any of the following after opening your email: mark this sender as safe, enable images from this sender, never send email from this sender to my spam folder, add sending to my contact list, etc.

Having an existing business relationship with someone doesn’t mean it’s okay to add them to your mailing list. If you are adding people automatically, or the sign up process isn’t clear, many of your recipients will flag your email as spam simply because they don’t recognize you or didn’t ask to receive your email to begin with. Complaints are the number one influence on your reputation so it is in your best interest to do everything you can to avoid recipients clicking the spam button.

Comments Off on Why do I need permission from contacts to add them to my list?

Spam traps are email addresses that may or may not exist and are used to judge your sender reputation.

The term “trap” refers to how these types of addresses are scattered throughout the internet to catch people either not using proper list building practices, harvesting emails, purchasing lists from a third party, or marketers who have poor list hygiene (whether they know it or not).

These trap addresses are kept secret to protect their identity and are released to no one because making them public would render them rather useless.

There are two types of spamtraps

“Honeypot” or “Planted” Traps

These email addresses have been intentionally created to trap spammers searching the millions of websites on the Internet for any address they can find.

These traps are never published and do not belong to a real person thus could never “opt-in” to any list since it is impossible for the address to initiate, respond or give consent to having received email of any kind.

Sometimes referred to as a “honeypot” or “planted” address, they are used by anti-spam groups to catch spammers, monitor and collect spam.

If you send an email to one of these traps, you will get exposed for using illegal marketing practices and you will get blacklisted which will seriously harm both your delivery and your reputation.

“Dormant” Traps

These are usually addresses that have been deactivated for a period of time (as little as 6-12 months) and are used by ISPs to judge the quality of your list data. These addresses no longer receive email except to catch this sort of activity.

Sending to a “dormant” trap address will not usually result in being blacklisted because these addresses may have opted in to your list at some point. It does, however, raise flags because you are sending to an email address that is out of date and indicates that you may not be processing hard bounces correctly and/or not removing them from your list. Sending to dormant addresses at any one ISP will affect your delivery.

– When changing providers, make sure you do not resend to any hard bounces or unsubscribed addresses from your current list. Addresses that have previously been marked as invalid could potentially be turned into trap addresses.

If you’d like to learn more about deliverability, refer to our Knowledge Base

It is important to know the difference between HTML and plain-text emails, and how they affect the delivery and engagement of your campaign.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It’s the way web pages and email templates are coded so that text is formatted and images are added.

Plain Text is regular text, with no formatting options such as bold, italics, underlines, or special layout options.

How does this affect your campaign?

Emails can be received and viewed in both HTML or Plain-Text formats. Depending on the email client or particular settings your recipients are using, an HTML campaign may or may not be able to be displayed.

If HTML is recognized, your recipient will see the campaign with images, text, and designs you may have chosen when you created your campaign.

If the HTML is not recognized (which may happen if the recipient is opening the email on a mobile phone, for example), it is important to have a plain text version of your campaign as well so that an email client can default to it.

Remember that plain text emails are not as easily trackable. We also recommend you try to limit the characters in the length of the URL – not only will it look sloppy when not masked by a title, but anything over 80 characters will cause the URL to break.

Your plain text version can include URLs, such as http:// and ftp://

Hints:

Generate a plain text version based on your HTML version by clicking Generate from HTML on the Edit plain-text version section in the Email Campaign Builder. Additional formatting is still required.

I’ve received some feedback from clients having issues rendering images on smartphones. With the sale of smartphones going up and more and more people receiving email on these devices, it’s normal to be concerned about the number of subscribers reading your emails on a handheld device.

After some research, I’ve been able to come up with a few key points that will help ensure that images in your email campaigns render more easily.

1- Make sure the sender exists as a contact
A smartphone’s way of marking you as a safe sender is by checking its contact list. It’s just the same as other email clients that check against an address book – but in this case, it checks the phone’s contact list.

2- Enable “Load Remote Images”
This option is used to protect your privacy. Make sure you check the phone’s settings and allow the email client to load images from a remote server. (You can usually find it under the mail options in the settings panel). This will also help you target your subscribers better and help you understand your open rates.

3- Size mattersA few weeks back we talked about the importance of template sizes and how they rendered in different email clients. The same applies here. Abiding by the same rules, keeping your template size under 600px will maintain the smartphone view in place and the email (and images) will not look out of place. Smartphones typically render at 320px, so 600px will show the email at 50%.

The viewport meta tag is a neat trick for iPhone devices. It allows the width of your message to be viewed at 100% inside the viewport (screen) and force the vertical dimension to render at 320px:

<meta name = “viewport” content = “width = 320”>

Keep in mind, however, that this only works for the vertical view. The landscape view will render the email differently. More information on the viewport meta tags can be found here.

As an alternative, CSS Media Queries are also widely used and more reliable in the mobile world.

Example:@media only screen and (max-device-width: 480px){

This will activate the devices viewport when the screen is any less than 480px.

Considering the items above when you’re developing a new campaign will make it easier for smartphone users to view your campaigns, as well as help you easily track engagement and target subscribers more effectively. While there is no email design standard for smartphones yet, we do see this coming in the near future, and we certainly welcome any more tips and tricks you’ve noticed as well!

If you haven’t registered yet, there’s still time, but you’ll need to act fast before the remaining spots disappear.

Members of the CakeMail dev team will be on-site to help folks get started with the CakeMail API, answer questions, and more. Oh – and we’re keeping our eyes peeled for a few new team members, so don’t be shy if you think we might have the cool new job you’re looking for (you can check out our current postings right here).

You’ve just sent your first campaign and now it’s time to review campaign reports. We’ve already looked at engagement and boosting your clicks – now we’ll take a closer look at open rates and how they work.

An open is registered in your campaign report when a recipient opens a campaign that has images enabled.

An impliedopen happens when a recipient has clicked on one or more of the links included in your campaign, without having actually viewed or displayed any of the images. Contacts who receive the plain-text version of your campaign will also register as implied opens when they click on a link.

An unopened email is a message that was never opened by the recipient, or a campaign that may have been opened but had no images enabled and the recipient didn’t click on any links or perform any other actions.

If you have included images in your campaign, it is possible that the email client has blocked images from loading. Until the recipient clicks to show content or display images (or even better, selects “Always show content from…”), the campaign won’t be recorded as opened. Be sure to let your list know to allow your images to be displayed or encourage them to add your From address (as shown in the example below) to their white list / address book to make your images display by default in the future.

You can see a detailed report of opens by accessing your delivered campaign and clicking on Detailed Statistics.

Keep your readers engaged. Write compelling, engaging content that your clients are happy to receive and eager to open, with great calls to action that encourage them to click links.

CakeMail has several features to help you keep track of clicks and engagement. Previously, we talked about engagement, a feature that helps you understand how effective your campaigns are and measures the quality of your relationship with your subscribers. The average click and open rates for the last 6 months are combined and given a grade out of 10.*

In addition, we also have Heatmaps available for all delivered campaigns. In each Heatmap, you’ll see colors beside each link, highlighting how many times a link was clicked by recipients. Colors range from violet to bright red: violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. The more times a link was clicked, the warmer the color (red).

If you accomplish Step 1, chances are you don’t have a problem with Step 2. ISPs know exactly how many of their users are opening/clicking/deleting/ignoring your emails. If you are sending to an active list of people that are engaged with the content you are sending them, your email delivery will not be an issue.

New EU cookie legislation went into effect May 25, 2012 that requires all users to give websites their consent to install cookies and track user information.

What is a cookie?

A cookie is a small file, typically made up of letters and numbers, that is automatically saved to a device when a user accesses a website. These cookies are then read by the originating website on each subsequent visit. Cookies are useful because they allow a website to recognize a user’s device and their preferences or settings where applicable. For more information, you can refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie.

What effect does this new law have on CakeMail?

To be compliant with this new law, we have introduced a new setting in the administration panel (under Your site settings -> General settings) that lets resellers activate or deactivate this setting as required. When activated, individual users will have to accept the application’s cookies policy before signing in. By default, this setting is deactivated as it only applies to a small segment of users.

When users click on “Change settings”, they are presented with a popup that provides more explanation, as well as a way for them to manage which cookies they accept. These cookies are separated into three categories: Strictly Necessary, Functionality and Targeting. If a user refuses the cookies classified under Strictly necessary, the application will simply not work.

If users change their mind about which cookies they would like to allow, we have also added easy access to cookie settings in the footer of the application, as in the example below:

But wait… there’s more!

We’ve also added the possibility for resellers to add a link pointing to their privacy policy in the footer of the application. This policy will need to be hosted on the reseller’s own website, and helps provide legal information to clients.

These features are now available in CakeMail and we hope you’ll find them useful. For detailed information, please read our Knowledge Base Article. If you have any questions, feel free to contact CakeMail Support or leave a comment below.

Each reseller account can set their own default time zone, which will apply to the scheduling and delivery of every campaign that goes out. The default timezone for the administrator’s account sets the default for all new accounts and account users created under it.

To set your default time zone, go to Settings > Your Site Settings > Sign Up Settings > Default Sign Up Country, State/Province, Time Zone

Each end-user also has the ability of adjusting their time zone if different from the one set by the account admin. When viewing an account, you will be viewing it in the timezone relative to the current user’s timezone.

To change the end-user time zone, hover over the end-user name on the top right menu options of the user’s account and click on Edit Information.

If you’d like to learn more about your account settings, including language, times zones and other settings, visit our support knowledge base.

Starting today, in order to improve overall performance, detailed campaign reports for delivered campaigns that are more than six months old will be automatically archived. Campaign overview reports will still include high level campaign information but the following data will be removed from the user interface for archived campaigns: